Of course, the company had little choice after NBC ratted out them out to the Telegraph, revealing that Twitter had contacted NBC and suggested they file a complaint regarding the gadfly journalist Guy Adams, who’d been lambasting the network’s Olympics coverage, including posting the email address of an NBC Sports exec. That complaint, of course, resulted in Mr. Adams’ suspension from Twitter, thereby quieting his nonstop complaints but unleashing a torrent of Internet fury.

In all cases, whether the user is the head of a major corporation, a celebrity, or a regular user, we require a report to be filed at our abusive users webform. Not only do we need a report, but we need a report from the person whose private information has been posted, or someone who is able to legally act on their behalf.

Mr. McGillivray brings it home with the final insistance that “We do not proactively report or remove private information on behalf of other users, no matter who they are.”

That’s all well and good, but the policy clearly wasn’t followed in this particular instance. And yes, Twitter owns up to that fact and apologizes:

That said, we want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.

But as other observers have already pointed out, this wasn’t exactly an isolated incident. You can’t ride two horses with one ass. Is Twitter going to be a media company, partnering with outlets like NBC to feed peppy real-time updates into its coverage? Or will it be an open platform, an unregulated firehose where gleeful users can pile onto and usurp a hashtag for their own, often anarchic purposes?

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